Part of National Security and Investment Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 2:30 pm on 3rd December 2020.
I have a brief inquiry, following the Minister’s recent letter to me on a previous point raised in Committee, for which I thank him for his prompt attention. If a hostile company takes over another company, effectively puts it into liquidation and walks off with the intellectual property, patents and various other things, and those are out of the door by then, will it be necessary to provide a validation for the transaction, if it has not been previously notified or noticed, and to then pursue the consequences of that validation by subsequent means, given that the company was presumably in existence at the time of the validation, if not thereafter? Would that perhaps not be a cumbersome procedure?